Lessons From Dan Hudock

Last week we had Dan Hudock, from Sandler Training, as a guest speaker in our class. Throughout his presentation, he discussed a variety of different tactics to improve both our everyday relationships and sales conversations. The topic that stuck out to me the most was his insight regarding how body language impacts the outcome of conversations and the way it can give “tells” as to how each party is feeling.

In class,  he had us perform an exercise where we had to ask one another questions without using specific key words, like ‘I’ and ‘me’. After we were done, he began to talk about what our body language during the conversations meant. It was so interesting to hear how something seemingly insignificant, like the placement of our hands or the way our feet were facing, display the emotions we were feeling during the exercise. As someone who has always been interested in psychology, it was super cool to see how something like body language ties into business, and how understanding that can help you in interviews and during sales conversations.

Additionally, I found it very interesting to see how he used sales tactics, some that we had discussed in class and ones that he mentioned during his talk, on us as he was trying to sell us on the Sandler sales methodology. He was sure to ask us questions, but also left room for our opinions regarding the tactics and any pushback that we may have had. In doing this, he presented himself as more of a teacher versus what one may immediately think of when they think of a salesperson. This tactic opened me up to what he was saying and kept me engaged throughout all of his discussion. It has been very enlightening to see throughout this semester, but especially this specific class, how these sales tactics actually work in real day-to-day conversations, and how different the world of sales is when compared to the picture I had of it in my mind.